Points Known and Unknown
2024 - Ongoing
As both a photographer and an architect, Peter often finds himself looking through the lens at the environments around him from a point of view of trying to figure out what constitutes the fundamentals of their characteristics. There are the obvious visual particulars of physical space, perhaps the less obvious tactile and environmental characteristics and then, on an individual level, a personal history with a place and with a culture that may exist around it. All of these things shape a distinct impression and a personal relationship to a place, but beyond that, there is another dimension that is less individual and more related to a kind of collective use of it, having to do with its own history and independent of our participation in it… It is like the memory of a place, often subtle and at first glance not evident, and we are privileged if we discover authentic traces of this among the environments around us.
Building on past history is part of human nature, and society is simply a culmination of all our cultural history intertwined with natural history and stacked on top of each other (where we simply inhabit only its most recent layer while other layers revel and inform the present in some limited ways). This is how society develops and appears the world over, but a captivating extension of this can be found right here in the deserts of Arabia and the Levant, in the domain of the various Bedouin tribes that have loosely inhabited this seemingly desolate land. Here, nature appears at first glance pristine and untouched, but it has actually been home to countless such nomadic people for thousands of years and one just needs to pause and look around to find the subtle traces of people from the past. The ancestral nomads are long gone now, but the desert quietly speaks back about them, and it is a remarkable inversion of an experience of a place to see it one way—as pristine and pure—and in an instant see it another way—as having had a rich former life of human habitation.
“Points Known and Unknown” is a visual survey of parts of these desert lands while accounting for the subtle hints that extend their vision to the past. Present conditions create the current context but the past gives these landscapes a sense of continuity and foundation… The series takes its title from a process used to survey the land that can be summed up as “the science of making precise measurements between known and unknown points to determine accurate positional locations.” In a similar manner, “Points Known and Unknown” uses its known points (the landscapes as seen today) and its unknown points (the traces of their memory) to more accurately arrive at a meaning of a place that is rich and grounded, yet eternally mysterious.
